The Story of Owen (32 page)

We left Vanzant's Landing just after lunch and headed back to Highway 6. There was smoke and fire and the sounds of explosions in the rearview mirror, and neither of us was very hungry. I made Owen eat more of the jerky, though, and choked down some as well. We also drank water. I felt a bit better after eating, but it helped to ignore the smoke.

Owen's phone beeped. We hadn't been sure if we would get cell coverage this far in the middle of nowhere, but apparently the towers in Tobermory and Spanish were pulling their weight, and a text got through.

“They're all okay.” Owen said, and I could tell he was relieved. “The dragons attacked exactly as they hoped.”

“Can you get a message out?” I asked. “Let them know we've started?”

“I can try,” he said. “Hopefully it'll get through.”

I let him type for a bit. I was dying to know how my parents were doing, even though both of them were in considerably less danger than Owen's family. Finally, I saw him press SEND.

“I told them to tell your parents you're okay if they can,” he said. “I'm sure Hannah would have told me about them if she knew anything.”

“I'm not worried,” I lied. “Dad's in the mine and Mum's in the hospital, which is probably safer.”

“That's true enough,” he said. He looked thoughtful. “Why is it, you think, that you can lie so well to reporters and so badly to me?”

“It's not just you,” I told him, glad for the levity and the part where he wasn't pressing the issue. “I am terrible at lying to all real people.”

“Reporters aren't real?” he asked.

“For a certain value of real,” I said. “You know what I mean.”

“If you say so,” he said. We drove in silence for a little bit. “Stop here,” he said. “There's a small lake over there, and we're past the limit of our fires.”

“There's going to be a clear path back to the tug, right?” I said. “I mean, I would like to be able to go home when we're done here.”

“We're okay,” he said. “The wind is blowing north again, so we can go anticlockwise around the island and not paint ourselves into a corner, as it were.”

“If you say so,” I said and killed the ignition.

This time the eggs were all small,
siligoinus
and the like, and they burned quickly. The lake was small enough, and the eggs densely packed enough, that we only needed to ignite a few of them and then watch the line of flames surround the whole thing.

“What about those islands?” I asked.

“Nothing's perfect,” Owen said. “We might have to do some cleanup later. We're only supposed to get most of them.”

“Right,” I said. “I forgot.”

“No worries,” he said. “It's been a busy day.”

“You are a very annoying person sometimes, you know that, right?”

“I do my best,” he said and shrugged off his harness so we could get back in the car.

We continued on, turning off of Highway 6 when it headed north toward the causeway to the mainland and taking the smaller County Road 540 instead to go west and south. The smell of fire and chemicals clung to my skin and my clothes and
my hair. There was also a weird miasma in the air that I didn't think could possibly be healthy, but we kept on. We had to refill the tanks twice as they emptied, and we stopped to wash our hands in nearly every body of water we passed.

It was getting dark by the time we reached Monument Corner, which was in the south-central portion of the island, and close to our finishing point. There was an orange glow beneath the horizon all around us, evidence of the fires that still burned. When the eggs were consumed, the fire jumped to whatever grass and trees it could reach and burned on. Sometimes it came to unoccupied lakeshore and stopped. Sometimes it destroyed the standing bones of whatever small town had once occupied that ground. Sometimes—most of the time—it encountered more eggs and burned them too.

Owen was sure that our exit was still accessible, and since the eastern sky was free of orange fire, I believed him. We were exhausted, running on adrenaline and beef jerky, plus the fumes of whatever we had been inhaling all day, and I hoped that the boat ride back to Tobermory would be peaceful, and that I could nap at the Mountie station before we went back to Trondheim. This was back in the days when I still planned ahead for the best-case scenario.

We were fixated on the shore of Mindemoya Lake, our eyes on the ground. We were entranced by the rhythm of burning fires and exploding eggs. We watched for the direction the fire took, but we didn't look up any higher than it took to check the wind. We were tired, and we forgot about the sky, with the dangers it could unleash.

I saw the dragon bearing down on us at the last possible moment.

“Owen!” I screamed at the top of my voice.

He reacted on instinct—what he'd been born with, descended through his bloodline, and what he'd honed with training and practice. He practically ejected himself from his flamethrower, correctly surmising that it was the source of carbon that the dragon was headed for. I threw mine off as well and scanned the sky to see if there were any more beasts incoming, but it seemed like the one headed for Owen was the only thing we had to worry about.

It was more than enough. Owen had rolled to get some kind of advantage by hiding behind the frame of what had once been a decent-sized rowboat, left abandoned all those years ago when the island was evacuated. It was only then that we realized the flaw in Hannah's design.

The packs were light, even when they were fully loaded with fuel, and the straps were positioned in such a way that we could both carry our swords strapped into the rig without hitting our heads on the pommels every time we turned. And therein, of course, lay the problem. Owen's sword was still attached to his backpack, and so was mine.

“Owen!” I shouted again, in case he was so focused on the imminent battle that he hadn't noticed yet. “Your sword!”

But it was too late. The dragon had landed between Owen and his pack, cutting him off from his weapon. It was small, but it was big enough, and Owen was unarmed. My pack had landed closer to the flames than I'd intended, and before I could pull it back toward me, the straps caught fire. I retreated, hoping Owen's hiding place was keeping him safe enough, and when my pack exploded in a ball of fire, the dragon turned toward me with a sharp keen of inhuman joy. I had what it wanted now,
and it was coming to get it. My body froze, overwhelmed by the music that blared in my head.

“Siobhan!” Owen shouted. “Siobhan, run!”

That's what you do when it's a
siligoinus
. That's how the song goes. You run and you hide, because
siligoinii
are stupid and they will never find you. That's what people who aren't dragon slayers do. They run and they hide and they get out of the way so that the dragon slayers can get their job done. Owen was already scrambling around the dragon's tail to get to his sword. All I had to do was play my part and hide, and Owen would do the job he'd been born to do.

“Siobhan!” Owen was screaming now. My legs were missing their cue. “For the love of God, GET OUT OF THE WAY.”

In desperation, he flailed against the dragon's tail with his bare hands, battering against the spines and scales. I thought that would probably be ineffective, but it was apparently annoying enough to divert the dragon's attention. Perhaps it thought it would have to share, and it wanted to take away any threat of a competitor to its feast. I saw the dragon start to turn, its tooth-filled mouth flaming, and I knew I wouldn't miss my cue again. It was a small dragon, but it still would have eaten him in one bite, unarmed as he was.

In the instant before the dragon turned, I saw the opening. Its twisted neck and bent back spine revealed the soft part of its chest. For a fleeting moment, I thought I could actually see its hearts beating there, two drums calling out for a blade.

Without thinking, I reached into the fire and grabbed my super-heated sword in both hands. I slid the blade between the dragon's ribs, severing both its hearts with one blow. It wasn't until I felt its blood stop pumping that I realized that I was burning too, and started to scream.

My name is Siobhan McQuaid, and I know things that no one else knows. Most of them, I will never tell, because they are not important to the story. But this is, and so I will tell it.

I know why Aodhan Thorskard is afraid of fire. It isn't because he's not brave. He is among the bravest of anyone I know, because he is afraid of fire and he walks toward it every day. And I know why Lottie Thorskard thinks fire is the enemy. She has seen it issue forth from the gaping maws of countless dragons, she has fought its rage with her every effort as it spewed up from oil-rich ground. And I know why Hannah MacRae thinks that fire can be controlled, used and shaped like the metal she turns into swords.

I love Hannah, but Hannah is wrong.

Once upon a time, I was a piano player and a weaver of notes onto staff paper. Mine was the trade of fingers and fingertips. Of scratching with a pencil across multi-lined paper. Of gliding up and down the keyboard, or running up and down the scales
with the wind from my mouth blowing beneath the finger pads. Mine was a gift that few others had, the ability to tease out the notes I heard in the ether and commit them to paper for others to read, for others to play, and for myself to listen to when I sat on the piano bench. I saw music in the world, and I could play it back for everyone else to hear.

And all of that ended the day I set myself on fire to save Owen Thorskard.

It wasn't a tragic end. If anything it was a semi-heroic beginning. I didn't hate Owen for what I'd had to do, and I didn't lose my music completely. Everything just got harder, from doing up buttons and opening the pickle jar to tuning a horn by pulling on a slide or turning the handle on a door. It wasn't the end of me as his bard, either. I still traveled with him, but he drove now, and I scanned the skies and cradled his sword between my knees, while he watched the road. And it wasn't the end of the Story of Owen. That had years to go.

When I woke up in the hospital, I was very confused. It smelled too clean, so unlike the chemical hell of the island, and I didn't remember how I got there. I hoped I hadn't driven.

“Mum?” I said, because I knew she'd be close by. She couldn't have treated me, of course, but no force on earth could have kept her from my room.

“I'm here, sweetheart,” she said, and I could feel her holding a straw to my mouth so that I could drink. My throat was irritated, and I wondered how much smoke I had inhaled and if any of it would kill me. I was only attached to a heart monitor, though. I could feel it around my finger. Surely if I was poisoned, they'd have me hooked up to more stuff.

I couldn't see clearly yet, which made me wonder how long
I had been out, but I could tell Mum was crying. I started to panic, wondering whom we had lost, and since I was clearly not about to be eaten by a dragon, I let it wash over me in waves this time. The monitor raced, and a hand closed on my shoulder.

“It's all right, Siobhan,” said Lottie. “We all survived.”

“Owen didn't drive here, did he?” I asked, my mind turning so fast that I said the first thing I thought of, even though it didn't make sense. “He doesn't have his license yet.”

“They came for us with a helicopter, Siobhan,” Owen said. My vision had cleared now, and I could see him standing at the foot of my bed. My dad was beside him, and Hannah was standing next to Lottie. I saw a tall shadow in the hall and knew that Aodhan was close by. The danger must be gone if they were all here.

“I wish I'd seen that,” I said. I squinted at him and saw that his arms were bandaged, and there were new burns on his face. “What happened to you?”

“I had to put you out,” he said. “You were on fire.”

Memory flooded back: the packs, the swords, the fire. My hands.
My hands
.

They were under the blanket and I was tucked in so tightly that it took me a second get free. No one tried to help me, even when I got tangled in the monitor cord, and I was grateful for small mercies. It couldn't be that bad if they didn't have to help me. I got my hands free of the blanket and saw that they were both shapeless; wrapped in bulky white gauze, except for my left index, where the monitor was clamped. Whatever pain medication I was on prevented me from feeling my fingers, assuming I still had them.

“How bad?” I directed the question at my mother. She winced.

“Owen had to break your fingers to get them off the hilt,” she said. “The heat had fused your skin to the metal, and you had pugilized before he got the flames out.” She held up her own hand, pulled into a claw to demonstrate.

“I'm sorry,” Owen said. “I didn't know what else to do. You were on fire.”

“What—” I started to talk and choked. I cleared my throat and started again. “What will they heal into?”

“The doctors were able to prevent any infection, which is the worst fear in burns, but it meant they couldn't set the bones properly.” She looked straight at me when she said it, and I understood why she had been crying when I woke up.

“I'll never play again,” I said.

“You will,” said Lottie. There were tears in her voice, and the trumpet blew bubbles. “You will play again if I have to keep breaking your hands until they set properly.”

“It's not that easy, love,” Hannah said softly. Lottie released my shoulder and looked away. Hannah pulled Lottie into her arms. Lottie looked so small, like my sword had.

“It's okay,” I said. “I know what she meant.”

“You'll lose a lot of your movement,” Dad said. “Your dexterity, that sort of thing. But with physical therapy, you should regain some of it.”

“So she will play again?” Owen asked.